September 2009 Archives

You know those Fathom Events things that are always getting promoted at the movies right between all those glorified TV commercials and the real previews?  The stuff that's either too highbrow (operatic performances), too foreign (Team Power Force Laser Face Naruto 7 Go!), or too "if you actually went to this one, stop reading my blog and go punch yourself in the face" (Glenn Beck) for most of us to bother with?

Well, they finally hit the demographic which I - even after more than two years of reviewing video games for an altweekly -  admit to being a member of with Turtles Forever.

From the synopsis -

This ninja tag-team extraordinaire begins when the new the gigantic, evil, and terrifying Technodrome (a giant mobile battle station from the original 1988 TMNT animated series) suddenly appears in our world, carrying with it the original 1988 series Ninja Turtles.  Our world's Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo find themselves with a huge mystery to solve and four crazy Turtles to babysit!  Can the Turtles of the past and the Turtles of the present stop annoying each other long enough to stop all of time and space from unraveling?  It's a must-see special event for the millions of Turtles fans everywhere --- a  journey across multiple dimensions that's full of twists, turns, and more Ninja Turtles than you've ever seen before.

Apparently Eastman and Laird have decided to go inter-universal and play Crisis on Infinite Turtles with their franchise. Fine with me, considering that the whole TMNT thing was initially created as a subversion of popular trends in comics.

Plus, there's always the chance the original original turtles will show up and bump the grittiness factor by a few hundred percent.  If so, I'll take ten.

Turtles Forever * West Town Mall 9 * 7:00pm * tickets on sale TBA (check website linked above for details)

Go here for details.

Hat Tip: memes

Here's a quick analysis of the Gmail meltdown of 9/01/09 detailing which aspects of the infrastructure were affected, why certain parts of the application functioned without interruption, and why such an event both is and is not a big deal.

Think of it as that power outage that hit the Eastern seaboard a few years back, but for the internet.  A few routers get overworked and shut down, which places a heavier workload on the remaining routers, a few of which reach that same overworked status and shut down, which places even more stress on the remaining routers, and so on. 

To the users in the trenches it was a nightmare (with the exception of those forward-thinking users who, say, forward their mission-critical gmail accounts elsewhere just in case - good for you!), but from an engineering standpoint it could have been much worse. 

Yesterday's failure was due to a system-wide request router crash.  As such, Google's webmonkeys have a single weak link on which to concentrate (I hesitate to say that the solution will be as simple as "figure out increased workload totals, add additional request routers to compensate," but it's not going to be much more complex than that). 

Had more than one element been a factor in the outage (God help us if any critical storage systems ever get hit), Google's engineers would be looking at an exponentially more complex problem.